Google Not Playing “Content Farms”

Google, we thank you. In a world where itâ€™s easy to dislike the big and powerful, you continue to give us even more reasons to like you.

Iâ€™m sure before the Yankees were winners, or back when Wal-Mart only had one storeâ€”they were loved. They were the greatest thing since Bell Telephone.

But as we do with so many teams and companies and celebritiesâ€”the bigger and more successful you become, the more skeptical we Americans become toward you.

Google could easily rest on itâ€™s billion-dollar laurels. But they donâ€™t. The same company that just gave us the most-played guitar in the history of the world has now given us some online peace of mind as well. Google has developed a new search engine ranking algorithm called Panda 2.2, which will help those doing legitimate SEO fight the constant battle againstÂ content farms.

Content farms are back-alley businesses that hire writers to do nothing more than write popular buzzwords into poorly-written articles and headlines. They mislead internet searchers into finding sites that wonâ€™t have any useful information for themâ€”wasting their time, but adding to the traffic data that those misleading sites can use to give value to their advertising sales.

To learn more about this practice and what Google has created to fight it, I invite you to read The New York Timesâ€™ Virginia Heffernan, who writes a great opinion piece about this subject this week:â€œGoogleâ€™s War on Nonsenseâ€